Black hole eating star creates longest cosmic explosion ever recorded

AccuWeather

NASA says that a stellar-mass black hole tore a star apart which created an unusually long-lasting gamma ray burst that has been identified as "GRB 250702B." AccuWeather's Emilee Speck has the story.

Transcript

00:00A black hole just did something that stunned astronomers.

00:09It tore a star apart and unleashed the energy of a thousand suns shining for 10 billion years.

00:15And it didn't stop for days.

00:17In July, telescopes around the world detected a record-breaking gamma-ray burst,

00:22the most powerful kind of explosion in the universe.

00:25NASA says these bursts usually only last a few seconds,

00:28but this one continued emitting energy for a week, making it the longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded.

00:35Scientists believe it began when a black hole tore apart a star,

00:38but even that can't fully explain its extreme duration.

00:42Follow-up observations from the James Webb and Hubble telescopes

00:46place the event nearly 8 billion light-years away,

00:49meaning it erupted long before our solar system existed.

00:53And because it fails to match every known model of how gamma-ray bursts form,

00:57astronomers say this cosmic outlier may be the start of an entirely new class of stellar explosion,

01:04a reminder that the universe still has surprises left.

01:07For AccuWeather, I'm Emily Speck.

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